My friend Melissa from The Autism Adventures of Room 83 invited me to write a guest blog for her website. For those of you who don't know our story, Melissa and I first met when we began our teaching careers in the same district. We had gone to same college, had been in some of the same classes, and then were placed in BTSA together when we started teaching. We even started blogging at the same time!

Even though Melissa teaches students with more moderate-severe disabilities and I teach students on the mild-moderate end of the spectrum, I have always found that I've gotten valuable advice from her - along with some great ideas for my classroom (and hopefully vice versa!)

So I don't know how else to put it… my students are OBSESSED and CRAZY over technology. I allow them to "work for" computer and iPod during work time. This makes them work to their full potential and it minimizes behaviors… that is until it's time to STOP playing. I have had kids in the past go into FULL BLOWN tantrum when it is time to transition back into work time.

With that being said, I wanted to share with you FABULOUS readers a little freebie. Click on the pictures below to grab it for free!!!

I wanted to share with you some of my favorite hands on activities that I use during my work centers to supplement our "boring" worksheet activities! These are some of my favorite LETTER activity games!

Be sure to read my post about Organizing Teacher Materials and Setting Up Writing Center! Once you have that all set up, you are ready to create the student writing notebooks. Once you have purchased the Writing Through The Year Bundle, you have all you need to teach writing for the year! You can choose to do this many ways, but I chose to do it the cheap way! I used the 10 cent folders and added cute labels. You can grab the labels for free by clicking HERE.

I hope yesterdays post introducing the Writing Bundle's printing guide was helpful to you. Today I am going to share how I organize all 1,300 pages of materials in a systematic useful way! First things first, here is what you need if you are going to do it the way I did! Of course, there are millions of other ways YOU can organize your materials. You need:

I wanted to do a post about organizing my "Writing Through The Year" Units as there are A LOT of materials that come included in the zip drive! First things first… head on over to TpT to grab my bundles. You can buy each one separately or buy all 10 for the price of 8 in one bundle!

Writing Through The Year! I have designed 10 units to teach students with autism and special needs how to write! Each unit targets a different grammatical skill and has anchor charts, grammar worksheets and a student reference page to support each kiddo! I have created 180 days worth of instruction! For all 180 days there are four differentiated levels so that students can progress towards independence yet work as a class on the same subject at their OWN level! Here are the 10 units!

So now we know WHAT assistive technology is, we know the different kinds of assistive technology…. so now what? How do we assess our students for assistive technology? Now, a little disclaimer… while I will share with you the BASIC steps and guidelines I want to assure you that your district will have their own steps and protocols to follow. Also, you must have an assistive technology certificate or degree to authorize an assessment. Because of this, I just plan to outline the steps to give you an idea of what to expect when making requests for your students and how to meet their needs!

All of the page numbers refer to the wonderful resource, www.wati.org
-go under the tab "supports"
-scroll through these WONDERFUL resources
-to reference the page numbers below, find ASNAT Manual- 5th addition

As I mentioned yesterday, assistive technology is anything/anyone that helps a student make progress. There are three types of assistive technology. Low Tech Assistive Technology is the most common form of assistive technology. Most of these are present in most classrooms and we are unaware that we even provide these accommodations.

As special education teachers, we all use assistive technology on a daily basis to meet our student's needs. But do we really know what Assistive Technology is? I just completed my certificate program on Assistive Technology and I would love to share my wealth of knowledge with you!!! So let me ask the important question…

Today, I found an amazing article that I truly believe every teacher should read. Every parent should read. Every tutor should read. Every babysitter should read. Every administrator should read. Every paraprofessional should read. Every grandparent should read.

Click on the image to read the article. It's about a teacher who is saving lives every friday afternoon.